Tai Cheng

What is Tai Cheng?

Tai Cheng is a 12-week total-body fitness program developed by martial arts master trainer Dr. Mark Cheng, designed for immediate and long-term benefits from learning the graceful movements of Tai Chi (pronounced “tie-CHEE”).

Tai Chi is a martial art practiced primarily for its health and physical conditioning benefits, rather than for combat. Many health experts today agree there’s an association between the daily practice of Tai Chi and improvements in health, both physical and mental.

Every day, the Tai Cheng program takes you through a gentle, energizing warm-up and the practice of Tai Chi moves. Each move helps you strengthen areas of weakness, tone muscles, and burn calories, while also helping you increase flexibility, improve balance, and reduce stiffness.

Why is Tai Cheng effective?

From childhood on, our mobility decreases until we lose our natural alignment, flexibility, and strength. We convince ourselves that it’s natural to wake up with aches, or fight through stiffness. But it isn’t.

Tai Cheng’s gentle and thoughtful movements can help open your joints, reduce painful knots in your muscles, and promote balance and flexibility, so your health can actually improve as you age. These therapeutic postures can help increase lung capacity, improve muscle strength, and encourage your blood to circulate more regularly through areas where it may have been sluggish, removing toxins and helping to boost your immune system.

The Tai Cheng workouts can make you feel good, help improve your posture, have a positive effect on your energy level, and help restore the fluidity and physical strength that come from gentle and comprehensive total-body conditioning. The practice of Tai Cheng promotes suppleness, strength, ease of motion, and inner peace, helping prolong your fitness and your enjoyment of the activities you love.

How does Tai Cheng work?

In teaching Tai Cheng, Dr. Cheng uses a technique called Dynamic Motion Control. This teaching method helps you understand Tai Chi and its movements by developing fluency in it, similar to the way you learn a new language: by first being exposed to sounds, then turning the sounds into words, and later combining those words into phrases. In Tai Cheng, you’ll learn individual movements, join the movements together to make combinations, then build the combinations into longer series.

Dynamic Motion Control allows you to experience the practice of Tai Chi, and the Tai Cheng program, without feeling overwhelmed by being introduced to too many moves at the same time.

What makes Tai Cheng unique?

Tai Cheng isn’t just a Tai Chi instructional video. It’s a fusion of the traditional Chinese martial art with modern functional movement training. Tai Cheng’s mingling of exercise for both body and mind can help you change your health in a profound way. Neural Reboot—the warm-up you’ll do every day—helps wake up your body, prepare your mind for Tai Cheng practice, and give you a platform of stability, strength, and safety. You’ll learn a workout that promotes balance and flexibility, helping you feel more energy and less pain. All this helps you develop greater physical control and body awareness.

Tai Cheng helps take the “parking brakes” off your dormant muscles and allows the overworked ones to relax. Through this practice, you’ll learn to move with less strain, access your full range of motion, and help condition your body to function as it should.

Dr. Mark Cheng

Dr. Mark Cheng, the creator of Tai Cheng, is a martial arts master trainer with 3 decades of experience in Tai Chi. He holds a PhD in Chinese medicine and acupuncture and is a licensed acupuncturist, traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, and physical therapy–based corrective exercise expert.

Dr. Cheng drew on his years of study and expertise to develop Tai Cheng, combining the ancient martial arts and wellness practices of Tai Chi and Qi Gong (CHEE-kung) with modern sports science and functional movement training.

Always looking to increase his knowledge and understanding of total-body wellness, Dr. Cheng’s teaching method reflects his inclination toward innovation, safety, and joy in movement. He currently has a thriving practice in Santa Monica, California, and travels worldwide for health conferences.

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